Afterland

The cashier doesn't blink at bullets, but the pharmacist refuses to give her antibiotics without a prescription. Fuck America.

Pale fields of grass twitch and shiver in the wind. These things make the fact of a murder distant and unseemly. Beauty allows for plausible deniability. Maybe that’s beauty’s entire function in the world, Cole thinks: that you can blind yourself with it.

Beauty allows for plausible deniability. Maybe that's beauty's entire function in the world, Cole thinks: that you can blind yourself with it.

Ruins are haunted by history, but so are people.

Mmph,” the officer glanced up from their South African passports, green mambas, her best friend Keletso called them, because they’d bite you with visa fees for all the countries you’re not allowed to sommer just go to. “And you’re returning to South Africa after your vacation?” “Yes, that’s where we live,” proud of the hard fact of it. Away from everyday Nazis and school shootings so regular they were practically part of the academic calendar along with prom and football season, away from the slow gutting of democracy, trigger-happy cops, and the terror of raising a black son in America. But how can you live there, people would ask her (and Devon, her American husband, especially), meaning Johannesburg. Isn’t it dangerous? And she wanted to reply, how can you live here?

Don't get too excited. The thing about fallen women is that they sure are clumsy.

The dark comfort of mortality, she thinks, the reminder that other people before them dreamed and suffered, created strange architecture, and disappeared for reasons incomprehensible to those coming after. Ruins are haunted by history, but so are people.

She was always bad cop in the family, setting rules and boundaries as if parenting wasn’t the worst game of improv ever.

and then no one was flying anywhere. You can’t imagine how much the world can change in six months.

And a bottle opener. It’s a craft beer, how civilized, Nebraska-made. That’s a clue. Maybe. “Don’t Step on Me,” the label on the bottle says.

And the bitch about the new world order: it requires money, same as the old one. She feels betrayed by all the apocalypses of pop culture that promised abandoned cities ripe for the looting.

No keys in the ignition. All the keys are locked away in the main building. Part of how they keep the inhabitants “safe.” Same reason all the cars here are manual transmission, another layer of security, because they assume the inmates can’t drive stick. To be fair, the American ones probably can’t. But the South Africans can.

to be a habit,” he says. But it could be.

You think fear eats up your capacity for wonder, but the awe cuts through her dulled and dimmed mind. Almost a religious experience. Don't let the Sisters hear you say that.